Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury’s Reviews > The Joke > Status Update

I felt the ground of this home sinking under my feet, felt myself falling, clarinet in mouth, falling down into the depths of years, the depths of centuries, into the fathomless depths (where love is love and pain is pain), and I told myself with astonishment that my only home was this descent, this searching, eager fall, and I abandoned myself to it and to my sweet vertigo.

because what had happened had happened and could never be redressed.

because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.

Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire,

the past of black insignias&of Lucie,the past that bewitches me,that I am trying to decipher,unravel,undo,&that prevents me from living as a man should live,with his head facing forward.And then there's the bond with which I want to tie myself to the past that hypnotizes me,&this bond is vengeance,but vengeance, as these three days have demonstrated, is just as futile as my running against the moving walkway of time.

I imagine a moving walkway (that is, time) and on it a man (that is, myself) who is running in the direction opposite to the direction the walkway takes; the walkway, however, is moving faster than I and is thus slowly taking me farther away from the goal I am heading for; that goal (odd goal, situated in the back!) is the past of the political trials,the past of lecture halls where hands are raised,the past of fear,

What? Just these three days? My entire life, it seemed to me, had always been overpopulated by shadows, and there was little room in it for the present.

They seem so to my human reason, but if history really has its own reason, why should that reason care about human understanding, and why should it be as serious as a schoolmarm? What if history plays jokes? And then I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable.

The errors were so common and universal that they didn't represent exceptions or faults in the order of things; on the contrary, they constituted that order. What was it, then, that was mistaken? History itself? History the divine, the rational? But why call them history's errors?

I will not detach myself from my thirty-seven years even if they represent so insignificant and fleeting a fragment of time that it is already being forgotten, has been forgotten.